Mailbox for iPhone now available with an interesting twist on managing email

A new email application dubbed Mailbox is now available on the App Store, offering a new way of filing through the hoard of email users receive on a daily basis.

Designed by Orchestra, Mailbox is available free for Gmail users. At the moment, Mailbox is a bit limited on who can use it, as the company is letting in only a select number of users as a way for the servers to balance. At the time of this post, we're at around 200,000 in the queue. It's not clear how fast Orchestra plans on letting users in.

Mailbox takes an interesting approach to email, treating it like task management (Clear comes to mind). The UI reminds us a little of Sparrow, now abandoned after its acquisition by Google.

The premise of Mailbox is to provide a fast experience, by offering the chance to delete emails with the swipe of a finger, mark them for later with a tap of a button, or read and archive them. The demo video below shows it best.

Unlike Sparrow, Mailbox offers push notifications to keep you up to date on emails received. With many email power users clamouring to reach the state of "inbox zero", Orchestra says it hopes to get you there.

Given our place in the queue, we haven't had the chance to check out the app ourselves. However earlier reviewers have noted Mailbox's powerful feature set. "Already the app I use most often," said blogger MG Siegler. The Next Web's Matthew Panzarino added: "Mailbox is something special. It’s well designed, crisply executed and features insanely obvious and satisfying mechanics."

A few issues that have been noted with the app include no support for Gmail's priority inbox besides stars, no email support besides Gmail, and a couple of UI elements that have acted up in the first version. Mailbox has noted that it intends to add Gmail priority inbox support soon.